The cast: Live and In Color, Starting July 26, 2016

The time is finally upon us, friends. Next week we'll begin live broadcasting video of the Giant Bombcast for Giant Bomb Premium Members. If you're a member, you can join us every Tuesday at 11AM as we do the thing we've been doing for the past eight or so years: record the Giant Bombcast.

This will be a look at our live audio production process, raw and uncut. That means that you'll get some breaks in the broadcast, you'll hear the music get laid in live, and the ad breaks will be present in the live version of the video. You'll see us talk into microphones! You might even catch a furtive glance or two, who can say?

For those of you who can't join us live, that video will, naturally, be archived. Those archives will be open for all to see, both on the site and on YouTube. We've been recording test episodes for awhile now as we sort of dial things in, and we're pretty close. Here's our test recording of this week's show:

As you watch, I've already got some notes on this test show. There's some lighting stuff in this video that isn't exactly how we want it and we'll probably clear the unused mics off the table. We have a light bit of decorating we'd like to do on that back wall, too, but we have to get the building facilities crew to handle that. We're also planning to install cough buttons as soon as we can get our hands on a set that doesn't add a bunch of hiss to our audio chain. We don't have a Skype setup in here yet, so remote shows and interviews are currently beyond us. That's more of a factor for the Powerbombcast, though, which is the only remote show we currently do. Anyway, consider all that as you watch!

We've been careful to focus on the audio portion of the show and not spin this up into some big, video-first feature. That's not to undersell what we're about to do, but I know some people are a little hesitant to the notion that people would be motioning to cameras and all that other shit that often comes many other video podcasts. Our goal is to basically keep doing the show we've been doing. People seem to like it that way! It's still the most popular thing we do! We've actually been pointing cameras at the podcast for years, even before we had our own studio. The catch is that most of those shows we recorded upstairs in CNET's podcast studio weren't actually being streamed and the cameras were merely on, not recording. So between that and the copious amounts of time we spend in front of other cameras, we're pretty used to the whole thing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little preview of the show. We're just about ready to go!